Elway

The Pythagorean theorem and two and a half Chucks.

The equation for measuring the hypotenuse of a right triangle has something in common with the use of a five-foot Hawaiian man as a rudimentary measuring stick.

John Elway was a hell of an inspiration for my buddies and me.

The only notable time I’ve used the Pythagorean theorem is still vivid in my mind, an electric moment when you see something so ridiculous that it sticks for eternity. Using Chuck Narikiyo to measure a height was joyously comical. Both are touchstones of my youth. Let’s start with theorem. On the afternoon of November 22, 1980, I was sitting in the corner of one of the end zones among my fellow Stanford University freshmen at Memorial Stadium on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Stanford was in the process of losing to archrival Cal in a steady, cold drizzle, making for a pitifully miserable day.

Then it happened: Elway did what only a transcendent athlete can do.

And he did it on an incomplete pass. It was the most breathtaking, astounding, and monumental incomplete pass I’ve ever seen, one that defied what humans are supposed to be capable of. On a broken play from the opposite end of the field, Elway ran to his right. He eventually made it within about a yard of the sideline as he looked for an open receiver. Eventually, a receiver got behind the Cal defense on the left sideline. Elway uncoiled his pigeon-toed body, uncorking a throw from approximately his own twenty-yard line.

The receiver ran downfield on the soggy turf, but the ball cut through the moist air as if it were a javelin. The pass sailed over the receiver’s head and landed out of bounds at the ten-yard line. Elway had just thrown a ball on an angle across the fifty-three-yard-wide field and sailed it seventy yards in vertical distance down the gridiron. For those who understand even rudimentary geometry, that’s way more than seventy yards, which by itself would have been amazing in a live-game situation.

From my angle in the corner of the end zone, I could see the right triangle laid out by Elway’s play. I had the theorem still fresh in my head from high school geometry. One side of the triangle was roughly fifty-three yards (the width of the field). The other was seventy yards (the vertical length of the field). If I wanted to figure out Elway’s throw (the hypotenuse of this triangle, as it were), all I had to do was add fifty-three squared with seventy squared and then figure out the square root of the resulting sum.

Or, as Pythagoras laid it out himself more than 2,500 years ago, A-squared plus B-squared equals C-squared (yeah, it’s pretty easy to remember). It came out to eighty-eight. Elway had just launched a throw eighty-eight yards. I may not have been a great athlete, but I could throw a football. Maybe sixty-five yards. With a good crow hop. On a perfect day. With no one around me to disturb the process, and maybe with a little tail wind. What I just witnessed from Elway stunned me, even if it drew only a few “oohs” and “aahs” from the crowd. Incomplete passes don’t wow the masses. But eighty-eight yards? On a wet field? In the rain? With no running start?

I was watching someone who could change the game with his talent. Between his arm and his scrambling ability, Elway redefined the Xs and Os of the game. There are only a handful of athletes at any time who can do that in a given sport. Back then, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were doing it in the National Basketball Association and Michael Jordan was a few years away. Wayne Gretzky was changing hockey, Martina Navratilova was altering women’s tennis, and Lawrence Taylor was redefining what was possible on defense in the National Football League.

Athletes like that change the parameters of sports. With Elway, what you would never imagine in drawing up a play was now completely in the realm of thought. Playbooks could be expanded. The absurd was possible. Conversely, what defensive coaches and players might normally scoff at was now something they had to fear when Elway was under center. Not that they took it on faith. They had to experience it for themselves. Over the rest of Elway’s college career and sixteen years in the NFL, defenders facing him for the first time would regularly stop running at a certain point when the receiver ran deep, figuring there was no way he could throw it that far. He’d then make even the best of them look foolish, as Ronnie Lott will explain later.

In the history of the NFL, there have been quarterbacks who have outperformed Elway from a statistical standpoint. Whether it was Dan Marino, Brett Favre, or Peyton Manning, many have compiled great stats, usually aided by better systems and better surrounding talent. Some quarterbacks have won more than Elway, most famously Tom Brady and Joe Montana. And other passers have even had some of Elway’s physical ability. Jeff George, JaMarcus Russell, and Drew Henson are among a host with cannon arms. Michael Vick and Steve Young were great scramblers. Cam Newton has the size (relative to his opponents). Bob Griese, Drew Brees, and Troy Aikman were among many who had the intelligence and will.

No one has ever possessed the collection of skills to the degree of Elway.

And now, no other quarterback has ever chased greatness for as long as Elway. Where others have rested on their laurels, he has remained resolute in his chase. These days, Elway is perched high above the fields he once roamed, surveying the game as Denver’s president of football operations and general manager.

Because, in addition to his raw skill, Elway possesses passion and an undying love of competition and willingness to chase it, even in the low levels of the game. Few people realize Elway spent his own money in the Arena Football League to get his start in management.

Years later, he put his legacy on the line.

Of course, none of us, Elway included, could know what was to come on that November day in 1980. All I knew as an eighteen-year-old is that I was witness to someone who was startling in his measurable, physical greatness. I felt as if I was watching Zeus toss thunderbolts from his hand. Little did I know I was watching the opening act of a Greek tragedy that would last nearly two decades.

The story of Elway is not about talent easily realized. It is about talent being tested to the point of torture, both on and off the field. He was like Prometheus, who gave fire to humans and then was punished by the gods. Elway was tied to the rocks and made to suffer season after season. This story is about a man so gifted he could have sacrificed working at his craft and still been great; yet he never did, even in the face of epic failure. After Elway finished his career by leading the Denver Broncos to back-to-back Super Bowl championships, he wanted to keep going. Elway is the definition of ceaseless desire.

This story is also about inspiration on a personal level. Elway didn’t just enable his coaches to change the parameters of what was possible on the field and help his teammates achieve greatness, he also pushed fans to search their own imaginations. Great artists do that, whether it was Elway on the field, Hendrix with a guitar, or Monet with a canvas and brush. For my friends and me, Elway was our muse. After leaving Big Game that day in 1980, we plotted to steal The Axe (the symbol of the Stanford-Cal rivalry) from Cal. We never did, but we had a plan. It was just too hard to safely acquire and transport that much liquid nitrogen.

In 1981, we executed our first good pre–Big Game prank. Along the northbound side of Highway 280 near San Mateo is a statue of Father Junípero Serra, the priest who wandered the west converting Native Americans to Catholicism. The statue features Serra on one knee with his finger pointing westward. To a bunch of sports-minded college kids, Serra looks like he’s a holder for field goals. My buddies and I decided to build a “football” in the form of a collapsible Chinese lantern and paint it red and white with a giant S on the side. The laces read the time-honored phrase “Beat Cal.”

There was just one thing we needed to know to get started. What was the height from the ground to the tip of Serra’s pointing finger? Being teenage men, we failed to bring a tape measure for our reconnaissance mission. Enter Narikiyo, one of our band of brothers in collective silliness. At five feet tall, he was a walking measuring stick. He stood under the statue and the distance from ground to tip was approximately two and a half Chucks, or twelve and a half feet.

That stunt is also forever embedded in my mind.

Our infatuation with all things Elway turned more serious as time went on. One night, Chuck commanded me to come with him to the Economics Department to help him get his blue books from an exam (do blue books even exist anymore?). Why, I asked, did I have to come along for such a mundane task? “Just do it,” Narikiyo said in an unusually serious tone. Upon arrival, he then told me to stand guard at the door. Wait a second. Stand guard? What the hell was going on?

“Elway is in my class; I’m stealing his blue books to get his signature,” Narikiyo said. I stood sentry without another word spoken. I admit this years later realizing an honor code violation could still be in the offing.

In 1982, we went bigger and bolder. We pulled back-to-back all-nighters to see Elway play at Arizona State University in a thriller that ended as a bummer. We then drove back bleary-eyed and disappointed after the game, too cheap to pay for an extra day on the rental cars. For Big Game that year, we buried a sprinkler system around the C on the side of Cal’s famed Tightwad Hill. The system was built with a timer set to go off at noon on game day and spray red paint on the gold letter. It was beautiful to witness the C go from gold to red in a matter of seconds. That same day, we nearly pulled off our greatest prank by hanging a 120-foot “Go Stanford” banner from the arms of the clock on Cal’s Sather Tower.

Sadly, the rope snapped, and the banner floated to the ground. Fortunately, the Cal cops took pity on us. Later that day, our chagrin was overcome by the anguish of witnessing Cal return the final kickoff through the Stanford Band for a game-winning touchdown.

Yeah, that game.

That play not only marked the end of Elway’s college career and overshadowed a phenomenal comeback he had led, but it also marked the end of our antics. Though Stanford was never great with Elway, there were some awesome moments, such as beating Oklahoma and smug coach Barry Switzer on their home turf in 1980. In Elway’s senior year, Stanford played five teams ranked in the top fifteen, including number two: Washington. Stanford won two of those games (against Washington and Ohio State University) and lost two by four points or fewer (Arizona State and the University of California at Los Angeles).

The roller coaster of Elway’s 1982 senior season gave way to the disgust of a 1–10 record in the 1983 season without him. The season was worse than the record looks in type, if that’s possible. The energy, interest, and intrigue of watching a singular talent like Elway was gone, and so was any inspiration for our imagination. Instead, my friends and I watched Elway from afar, reveling in his great comebacks and bemoaning the lack of talent the Denver Broncos put around him for most of his career. His first three Super Bowl appearances were a series of double-edged swords. He basically took the Broncos to those games on the strength of his heroics before the inadequacy of the team showed up. The Super Bowl losses gave ammunition to critics who claimed Elway was overrated.

Overrated? Are you freaking kidding me? It didn’t matter how any of us argued the case for Elway’s greatness; the truth is that quarterbacks are judged by Super Bowl victories. That meant the critics won the early rounds. Terry Bradshaw became a television star at Elway’s expense. Bradshaw was able to hide his jealousy of Elway behind his folksy, country accent as the audience conflated conniving with wisdom.

Even when Elway walked away after back-to-back Super Bowl wins, there were claims he was carried there by the performance of running back Terrell Davis. Elway’s fierce competitiveness was discounted. When he returned to the game a few years later in the Arena League, few understood how seriously he took the league because they weren’t really paying attention.

Again, there was no resting on career achievement. He wasn’t satisfied to play golf, sign autographs, and live off simply being John Elway. The man of great talent and accomplishment had morphed into a man driven to compete at the next level of life. That, above all else, is the true genius of Elway. The man who once threw a ball in a way that defied conventional physical boundaries wasn’t satisfied with the gifts he had been born with.

He was consumed by reaching a higher level, a level of achievement that can’t be measured by any theorem. Or even with the help of a five-foot Chuck.